Friday, June 13, 2008

Here's Lucies

Several folks who watched that clip from The Secret World of Og have written to ask about (or compliment my E.S.P. about) the name of Lucy Lawless. In the clip from '83, one of the characters mentions her passion for Lucy Lawless novels...and of course, a decade or so later, an actress named Lucy Lawless became quite famous, particularly for playing the title role on the TV series, Xena: Warrior Princess.

I did not predict Lucy Lawless. Pierre Berton used the name in the 1961 book I adapted. I gather Lucy Lawless was supposed to be a mystery-solver in the grand tradition of Nancy Drew.

According to Wikipedia, which as we all know is never wrong, Lucille Ryan married Garth Lawless in 1988 and kept his surname after they divorced. So that's how she became Lucy Lawless. Just a co-inky-dink.

• Posted at 4:26 PM · LINK

The Latest...

So after 41 minutes, the lady comes back on the line and tells me that she can find no record "in the system" of any appointment being scheduled for today. Why am I not surprised?

She says they'll send a technician out tomorrow between the hours of 10 AM and Noon to see what the problem is. I say, "You had a technician here yesterday for two and a half hours. Why couldn't he tell you what the problem is?"

She says, "I don't know but this is how we have to do it. If he is unable to get your phones working, he can request a supervisor to come in." I say, "The guy yesterday was unable to get my phones working and he said he'd request a supervisor to come in."

She says, "Yes, but he didn't so we have to send someone else out."

Okay, here's my prediction: The guy tomorrow can't make it work, he says he'll request a supervisor...and then either he won't or there won't be a supervisor available for more than a week. In these situations, anything less than total cynicism is way too optimistic.

• Posted at 3:35 PM · LINK

Trapped on Hold for All Eternity

We're still having trouble with our digital phones from Time-Warner Cable, trying to get another line installed. Yesterday, after twice rescheduling earlier appointments at the last minute, they finally sent an installer. He showed up at 3:00. Around 5:15, he informed me that he had successfully installed the line with one teensy problem: It wasn't connected to any of my phones.

The phone line is, he said, working properly insofar as reaching my house is concerned. He just can't get it into any of the phone jacks I have in my home. He spoke of this as if it were a minor technicality and told me that a specialist would come by today "after noon" and solve the problem.

Well, I'm waiting. At 2:30, I phoned Time-Warner and a man in Customer Service said he'd find out if and when my service call would be happening. He then put me on hold for fifteen minutes, at which time the call just disconnected on me.

Around 2:47, I called back and got a nice lady who listened to my tale of woe and swore she'd help me. She said that, unfortunately, she'd have to place my call on hold while she waited for a "supervisor" to step in and help her with this matter...but she swore that if I got disconnected, she'd call me back. I have now been on hold for 27 minutes and 30 seconds.

• Posted at 3:16 PM · LINK

Tim Russert, R.I.P.

Nothing to say beyond the obvious, especially since we're in that awkward period where it would be distasteful to mention anything but the man's positives. He was expert at taking the personal nastiness out of politics and of reminding all that the job of the press is to challenge our leaders and those who aspire to be part of the leadership. I always found his reporting to be entertaining, even when I felt he did not interrogate his witnesses with sufficient vigor. Those are going to be some huge shoes that will need filling.

• Posted at 1:53 PM · LINK

Today's Video Link

I don't link to a lot of clips of shows I worked on but for some reason, I've recently received a number of questions about The Secret World of Og, a three-part ABC Weekend Special that I wrote back in 1983 or thereabouts...so I'll write about it and let you see a couple minutes. The ABC Weekend Special was that network's capitulation to demands for something "educational" on the Saturday morning schedule. Later, CBS responded to similar demands with a series called CBS Storybreak and I did a mess of them, too, plus I wrote a lot of the host segments for both shows.

Both endeavors usually involved adapting kids' books for animation, the idea being to encourage reading. In some cases, if our adaptation prompted a child to run out and read the book in question, that child must have been somewhat baffled because a lot of those books were changed quite a bit for the screen. In one case, I was tossed (literally) a paperback and told, "Here...we bought the rights to this but just use the title and the character names and make up a new plot." Eventually, we even did one which was created as a TV special...then the studio arranged for a book to be published before the special aired, and we fibbed and claimed the show was adapted from the book, when in fact the opposite was true.

The Secret World of Og was a 1961 book by the prolific Canadian author and TV host, Pierre Berton. An ABC exec actually told me that he was excited by the acquisition because, after all, this was the man who wrote the book on which Planet of the Apes was based. When he told me this, I thought, "That doesn't sound right but I guess he knows." Of course, when I later checked, I discovered the ABC guy didn't know. The ape movie was adapted from a book by Pierre Boulle, not Pierre Berton, and even though I so informed everyone, at least one ABC press release continued that confusion.

Mr. Berton's book was a fantasy about four kids, named after and modelled on his own four children, who were apparently always losing things. In the story, they found a hidden world via a secret tunnel under their playhouse, and there they came across all the things they'd lost in the surface land. ABC paid a bit above their usually rock-bottom fees to acquire the animation rights to the book, so I was told they wanted to get three half-hour episodes out of it. This was good because if I'd had to cram it into one, it would have been corrupted beyond all dimension. Given thrice the space, I was able to do a pretty faithful presentation...one that prompted a lovely "thank you" letter from Mr. Berton. I wrote him back and told him, among other things, of the Planet of the Apes muddle and he replied that it wasn't the first time someone had made that mistake and thanks to ABC, it probably wouldn't be the last.

The one significant change I made from the book, apart from tossing out about half the incidents in it, was because the network folks wanted a clearer moral at the end. They didn't really care what it was, just so long as the kids learned something that was easily summarized. After reading and re-reading the book several times, I decided that only one moral that I could abide flowed logically from this story: Don't read books. Throughout, the kids had been conflating fantasy with reality, and spending too much time living in stories instead of the real world. So I went with that...and no one to this day has ever commented on the fact that though the ABC Weekend Special was intended to promote reading, I wrote one that told kids, "Hey! Stop reading and go outside!" I still think that's not a bad message.

The three parts aired about 8,000 times on ABC, then were edited together into a quasi-movie which has run often on cable and (I'm told) received limited theatrical release in some countries. It's available on this DVD which is currently out of stock on Amazon but they say if you order it, they'll get more. Very young audiences might enjoy it. I'm supposed to somehow get money from its ongoing exploitation but have yet to see a cent. I suppose some day when I'm in my eighties, I'll get one of those checks that's barely worth flipping over to endorse.

Here's the first two minutes of the thing. The animation was done by a company that was then functioning as Hanna-Barbera Australia and I thought they, especially producer-director Steve Lumley, did a very nice job. The mother's voice is Janet Waldo, better known to you all as Judy Jetson and Penelope Pitstop. The two little girls are Noelle North and Brittany Wilson, and the silly green man is the fine impressionist-singer, Fred Travalena. Also in the cast were Hamilton Camp, Peter Cullen, Julie McWhirter, Andre Stojka, Michael Rye, a buncha other folks and the legendary Dick Beals. Here it is...